Smart planning of remaining mills could declutter Central Mumbai

Opening up a portion of the mills around the railway axis of Parel, Dadar and Elphinstone might be particularly useful in catering to commuter load.Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar | TNN | October 01, 2017, 09:04 IST

MUMBAI: With around 100 acres potentially available from undeveloped mill lands in central Mumbai, planners and architects point out that parts of this zone can still be decongested—if the government has the will to make use of the opportunity.

Opening up a portion of the mills around the railway axis of Parel, Dadar and Elphinstone might be particularly useful in catering to commuter load. Tata Mills, for instance, lies on the eastern side of Elphinstone station, the site of Friday’s tragic stampede.

Thirteen of the 56 original mills remain undeveloped in central Mumbai, of which 11 belong to the National Textile Corporation and two to private companies. Most of these mills are shuttered, and a few are said to be functioning.

These mills would generate roughly 100 acres for low-cost housing and open spaces under the latest development control rules, notified in July, which revert to an old land-sharing formula that divided up the lands once leased out to textile barons equally between the mill owner, the municipality and the state housing agency.

The formula was intended to allow agencies to provide civic amenities, including roads and parks, and affordable housing in a congested area expected to transform into an office district. But the formula was tweaked in 2001 in favour of the mill owners, resulting in chaotic development with little infrastructure.

With the bulk of the mills gone, the chance to implement an integrated development of the area, like that proposed by the Charles Correa-headed government committee in 1996, seemed to have vanished. Even the latest development plan for the city has no special plan for this area.

Among other things, the Correa committee envisioned opening up the congested Parel-Elphinstone railway area by using parts of Elphinstone Mill on the western side and Tata Mills in the east. Elphinstone Mill has long been sold —it is now the site of Indiabulls Centre—but Tata Mills remains.

“The potential to create a buffer for the station is there if a part of Tata Mills can be used,” said Pankaj Joshi, executive director of the Urban Design Research Institute. He added, “Depending on their location, the remaining mills can still be useful for decongesting the railway areas especially.”

It’s not too late to improve the situation, agreed Kedarnath Rao Ghorpade, former planner with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority. “If they do a comprehensive assessment of the area—focusing on the Parel-Byculla-Lalbaug axis— and look at not just at the remaining mills but the chawls and other lands, they can figure out how to open up the area and improve connectivity,” he said.

Improving road space is particularly important, said Ghorpade, who was part of the regional planning authority’s internal survey of mill areas in mid-1990s. One way to create road space in dense areas, he said, is to amalgamate large plots and integrate them with their surroundings. “But all this requires convergence between railways, BMC, and mill owners.”